Pulang Pisau, Central Kalimantan. The residents of Jabiren faced a nervous wait in October last year as fires raged in the peatlands around their village, Jakarta Globe reported news.
“Fire stormed this area — including that land across from here,” said Muhrizal Sarwani, the head of the Agricultural Land Resources Agency (BBSLDP), pointing at an abandoned field across a nearby ditch. “All other places were affected by the fire, except for this site.”
While other tranches of land in the area — peat, mostly — were degraded by a particularly uncompromising fire in 2005 that laid waste to the forest covering, this five-hectare plot is still standing. Now, the government and environmentalists believe that the lessons learned here can be put to work at lessening the impact of one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems — Indonesia’s ticking carbon time bomb.
The Sustainable Peatland Management project began in 2010 across five different pilot sites in the archipelago after it was proposed by the Ministry of Agriculture and had its funding approved by the Indonesian Climate Change trust Fund (ICCTF). Jabiren was one of the locations chosen — the Central Kalimantan arm of the project is scheduled to run until 2014.
“[Peatlands] here have been degraded for quite a long time, and have repeatedly fallen victim to fires,” Muhrizal said during a visit to the project site in Jabiren last Thursday.
He puts the success of this project, so far, down to three focuses that depart f...